Im curious if anyone has made the jump from standard SSD like the samsung 850 to an m.2 blazing fast samsung 960 or 960 pro.. and if so.. how did your load times change..  IE: did 5 minute loads become 1 minute etc?

I'm on the 1TB drive.. and with tons of scenery (all enabled) it might take 6-7 minutes on a full load.. I'm debating the merits of buying one of these drives vs constantly manipulating sceneryeditor groups and simstarter profiles to break things into smaller load times..  The current retail on the 1TB is in the $419 range.. or perhaps even getting a smaller drive just to load the core / bulk of the main directory could help  (i have an 850 ssd for my os as well).

Any experiences out there?

Thanks in advance

i went from a samsung ssd 250gb  to a m2 ssd 950 pro 512 gb.

but i didnt feel or see any big difference.

 

12 minutes ago, 331BK said:

i went from a samsung ssd 250gb  to a m2 ssd 950 pro 512 gb.

but i didnt feel or see any big difference.

 

I'm pretty sure the m2 950's arent near as fast as the m2 960's.. the 960s have read /write speeds like 3000 and 1900 vs say 500 or so with the 950 from what i saw.    I think its like trading form factors (3D to vnand).  I think i'm gonna give one a shot and try to copy over the drive files and compare one to one.

I got one of the 960s in this newer PC I built. The load time was quite an improvement over the old 850 but if you add the terrain tweak in V4, its still a decent wait. I was hoping the new drive would help with blurry scenery textures but faster load times were the only difference I saw.

It's a matter of overall system balance and how much stuff you add-on in the sim. I have a 512MB M2 960 Pro for P3Dv4 and she sings. Looks good too, no blurriness or stutters to speak of. If you have the money and the proper motherboard, it has the speed.

A fast SSD is a musthave. However , this only works if cpu/mobo/memory/gpu are not the weak link(s)..

I've got two of the Samsung 960 PROs, a 512 for Windows and 1TB for Prepar3d.  With Megascenery Earth, Orbx, etc my sim loading times are under a minute.  I can start the PC and load into Windows 10 in about 8-10 seconds.

However, this is my first build in about 5-6 years, coming from FS9 and a HDD, so I can't really compare it to any other modern hardware options.

My previous p3d install was on an 850 Pro and now with V4 it's on an M2 960 evo and the differences are negligible. If anything I'd recommend to install the OS to the M.2 drive and P3d on a regular but still fast SSD.

2 hours ago, Dave_YVR said:

My previous p3d install was on an 850 Pro and now with V4 it's on an M2 960 evo and the differences are negligible. If anything I'd recommend to install the OS to the M.2 drive and P3d on a regular but still fast SSD.

Are you running the m2 960 evo via the motherboard connector or a pcie that is at least 3.0 and 4x, curious.

 

19 hours ago, JasonW said:

I got one of the 960s in this newer PC I built. The load time was quite an improvement over the old 850 but if you add the terrain tweak in V4, its still a decent wait. I was hoping the new drive would help with blurry scenery textures but faster load times were the only difference I saw.

By terrain tweak, do you mean this?

TEXTURE_EXP_SIZE= 10?

 

Mine is the default, 8.. i wasnt sure setting to 10 was worth it, load times aside.. hadnt really tried a 10 yet.

18 minutes ago, theskyisthelimit said:

Mine is the default, 8.. i wasnt sure setting to 10 was worth it, load times aside.. hadnt really tried a 10 yet.

Your loads times will increase significantly regardless of SSD with TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10, even more so if you have lots of add-on scenery.

If your CPU and memory bandwidth is up to the task the M.2 960 "might" be a little faster (but probably not noticeable).  Most of the "loading time" is CPU bound not I/O bound ... from my testing the threshold appears to be around 350MB/sec with the CPU's I've tested with (5960X, 6900K, 7900X, 7700K) on various SSDs/HDs.

I doubt you'll see much performance difference in P3D or XP11 or any flight sim using 960 PRO vs. 960 EVO ... if budget is not an issue, then I'd go with the 960 PRO 1TB ... if you plan to run A LOT of PR scenery, then you might want to consider the 2TB (it's actually cheaper to get two 960 1TB than a single 2TB).

On a side note: I purchased a WD 1TB SSD (this one https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250080&cm_re=wd_1tb_ssd-_-20-250-080-_-Product) a few days ago and loaded up P3D V4 on it for testing and it performed just as well as my M.2 960 PRO at 1/2 the cost.

Cheers, Rob.

4 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Your loads times will increase significantly regardless of SSD with TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=10, even more so if you have lots of add-on scenery.

If your CPU and memory bandwidth is up to the task the M.2 960 "might" be a little faster (but probably not noticeable).  Most of the "loading time" is CPU bound not I/O bound ... from my testing the threshold appears to be around 350MB/sec with the CPU's I've tested with (5960X, 6900K, 7900X, 7700K) on various SSDs/HDs.

I doubt you'll see much performance difference in P3D or XP11 or any flight sim using 960 PRO vs. 960 EVO ... if budget is not an issue, then I'd go with the 960 PRO 1TB ... if you plan to run A LOT of PR scenery, then you might want to consider the 2TB (it's actually cheaper to get two 960 1TB than a single 2TB).

On a side note: I purchased a WD 1TB SSD (this one https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250080&cm_re=wd_1tb_ssd-_-20-250-080-_-Product) a few days ago and loaded up P3D V4 on it for testing and it performed just as well as my M.2 960 PRO at 1/2 the cost.

Cheers, Rob.

Wow interesting info.. and very inciteful.. then it sounds as if anything standard SSD is going to be almost as good as it gets, except for maybe access time with the m2 or m2 pro, at least in terms of read/write performance with that 350 MB/s cap.

I still have XP11 on regular 7200, mainly because i have 8TB of ortho for that one.. theres no going SSD at least on the ortho and i figured no point even for the main sim, well maybe some point.

Eventually ill have more Photo scenery with P3D, right now i'm under 150GB i'd say out of the 1.2TB i have going on (I have some spill over onto a regular 7200).. i was planning on just putting the photo real on a 7200 (i know counter productive in terms of speed), but i probably wont use it much, at first at least (working on some scenproc building overlays if that pans out maybe more so).

Longing for the day these larger capacity ssds come down in price to cover all the sims/scenery in one shot or two :)

 

That wd appears to be similar in spec to my existing evo ssd.. around 500 mB/s etc... 

 

If the m2 ends up a bust, ill stick with my ssd pro 850 and continue breaking things into groups in scenery.cfg/simstarter for now to keep it faster.

Thanks for your great info here as always

 

 

Does anyone know if any p3d addons track the hardware id of the harddrive installed to.. making it harder to just copy (or clone with acronis) the contents of the old hard drive to the new (or test hard drive)?

I've never encountered this but it was mentioned before that some could track the ID.. 

I usually just acronis and change the drive letter to what it was on the old drive and go.

Curious

22 hours ago, JasonW said:

I got one of the 960s in this newer PC I built. The load time was quite an improvement over the old 850 but if you add the terrain tweak in V4, its still a decent wait. I was hoping the new drive would help with blurry scenery textures but faster load times were the only difference I saw.

Hey JW -- the issue of blurry scenery is being investigated by LM -- it is probably a bug in P3D. You are not the only one affected by this. See the thread about P3D V4.1.

5 hours ago, theskyisthelimit said:

Are you running the m2 960 evo via the motherboard connector or a pcie that is at least 3.0 and 4x, curious.

 

 Plugged straight into the m.2 slot on the mobo. I'm sure that better gains would have been to reinstall the OS on the M.2 drive and put P3d onto the 850 Pro. Next time.